Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

This post is published externally at https://medium.com/@MrJamesFisher/wikipedia-needs-an-ide-not-a-wysiwyg-editor-7acd85b582c8 .

Wikipedia, if you haven’t heard of it already, is the world’s biggest software project. At almost a billion lines, it’s twice as large as healthcare.gov. It’s coded in a homegrown Turing-complete programming language, and the full thirteen years of history is kept in a homegrown version control system. The final built artifact — an online encyclopedia — gets more traffic than Twitter.

What can computers do? What are the limits of mathematics? And just how busy can a busy beaver be? This year, I’m writing Busy Beavers, a unique interactive book on computability theory. You and I will take a practical and modern approach to answering these questions — or at least learning why some questions are unanswerable!

It’s only $19, and you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

After months of secret toil, I and Andrew Carr released Everyday Data Science, a unique interactive online course! You’ll make the perfect glass of lemonade using Thompson sampling. You’ll lose weight with differential equations. And you might just qualify for the Olympics with a bit of statistics!

It’s $29, but you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

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